New East Symposium
House of Fools
| [Dom durakov]
Russia/France, Persona and Hatchette Première et Cie, 2002, |
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Set in a psychiatric hospital during the Chechen conflict in the war-torn republic of Ingushetia, Andrei Konchalovskii's House of Fools offers the familiar metaphor of madhouse as societal microcosm. As Chechen and Russian troops take turns occupying the mental institution, the film follows the more stable inmates' attempts to preserve order in the power vacuum created by the absence of their good-natured doctor, who goes off in search of buses to evacuate them. Between scenes that depict the absurdities of war, the film revolves around a pair of unlikely relationships: the first is between Zhanna, an endearing female patient, and Akhmed, a Chechen soldier who proposes to her in jest; the second relationship emerges out of Zhanna's romantic fantasies in which she believes she is engaged to Canadian pop-star Bryan Adams. As the film progresses, it finds a balance between the pervading war, the music video-like interludes of Adams, and the disorder that threatens to erupt out of the insanity of the hospital and ongoing conflict.
According to Konchalovskii, House of Fools was inspired by a news report about an actual mental institution located in Chechnya that was overrun by Russian and Chechen soldiers. Into this story Konchalovskii injects the balm of music and love. Zhanna's accordion playing and Adams's cameo appearances compensate for the dreary walls of the hospital. The switch from low-color to high-color shot exposures when the musical interludes begin suggests a sharp directorial dynamism that ultimately sustains the illusion that a war is raging outside the institution's walls. Tim Schlak
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In contrast to the outside world, the hospital remains a place of humanity and kindness even as shells burst through the institution's walls. Throughout the chaos, the patients demonstrate such an ability to care for each other that, in comparison with the soldiers' cruelty towards one another, the old question inevitably arises concerning who in the madhouse is insane. The comic relief provided by the inmates relies on the stock nature of the characters: the dwarf, the effeminate Goga, the trouble-maker Makhmud, Vika the diehard communist, and Zhanna's sex-crazed roommate, Lucia. Nonetheless, the plot coheres in a compelling way around Zhanna, played by Iuliia Vysotskaia, Konchalovskii's wife. As she naively leaves the institution to marry Akhmed, she returns the film to the realia of war when she enters the Chechens' camp. These elements are as internal and important to the film's spirit as the stereotyped characters are. The film is a nightmare that does not horrify but rather affects the viewer with the ironies of war. In place of outright depictions, the film offers only visions of war. Likewise, madness is not exclusive to the community of patients, but rather it is a relative condition that grows out of the film's more ironic moments. While negotiating the sum to be paid for a dead soldier's body, a Russian and a Chechen commander discover that they served together in Afghanistan. Their camaraderie, however, is shattered by an exchange of fire accidentally triggered by a Russian soldier. Akhmed's search for asylum among the mental patients at the film's conclusion suggests that the insanity of the institution is preferable to the madness of the world just outside the hospital.
A well-known director and screenwriter, Andrei Konchalovskii was born in 1937 in Moscow. The child of Natal'ia Konchalovskaia, who was a poet and author of the book|
Filmography 1961 The Boy and the Pigeon |